"Are We Providing Enough to Those who have Too Little? Measuring Poverty Relief"

REPLICATION FILES

Prepared by
Karen Long Jusko (corresponding author: kljusko@stanford.edu)
Katherine Weisshaar


22 July 2017

This manuscript presents a new measure of safety net program effectiveness—--a “poverty relief ratio”—--based on the estimated relationship between market income and social transfers, and reports the amount of income support provided, relative to the amount required to provide for all low-income households’ basic needs. In an important advance over the standard poverty reduction rate measures, the poverty relief ratio preserves the rank order of observations across varying poverty thresholds. In this paper, we introduce this measure and demonstrate its validity by tracking major changes in federal policy, and cross-state variation in safety net programs.


The following files are included in this replication archive:


(1) STATA SCRIPT FILES  
 
20170719_JuskoWeisshaar_run.do is the master file, and is the ONLY script that should be explicitly executed by users.  This script calls all other .do files (listed below), which then perform data-cleaning, conduct the analysis, and generate the tables and figures reported in the main article and on-line supporting materials.  

20170511_Data_Prep.do
20170511_R_by_State.do
20170511_R_by_Year.do
20170511_Composition.do
20170511_CA_FL_TX.do
20170511_Plot_Parameters.do
20170511_Map.do
20170511_TANF_UI.do
20170511_US_times_series_Figure.do
20170511_varyingThresholds.do
20170511_State_thumbnails.do
20170511_stateParameterTable.do
20170511_R_by_State_EH.do



  
(2) DATA FILES 

ipums_cps_00012.dta (which includes CPS ASEC, 1988-2016) is the key foundational data-set for this analysis.  


Other data-sets used in this analysis, and included in the replication files, include:

CPI2016.dta (reports the consumer price index)
FIPS.dta  (provide state FIPS and alphabetic codes)
20161011_awb_st_cy.dta (average weekly UI benefit amounts, by state, and for calendar years; see the text for full documentation)
20161011_WRD_TANF_Clean.dta (from the Welfare Rules Database, state TANF amounts; see the text for full documentation)
US_state* (several files used to generate the map reported in Figure 4)

JuskoWeisshaar_Table1.xlsx reports the references used to support the analysis reported in Table 1.

JuskoWeisshaar_Table1forAppenixC.xlsx reports the parameters estimated for each state, and was used to generate Appendix C, Table 1.   




(3) STATA GRAPHICS FILES (.gph)

In addition to files used to generate the Appendix B (State_1.gph-State_50.gph), the replication materials include the following graphics files:

FIGURE 1
20161021_Fig1_1014_US_bar.gph

FIGURE 2
20161021_CA.gph
20161021_FL.gph
20161021_TX.gph

FIGURE 3
20161021_Parameters.gph

FIGURE 4
20161021_Map.gph

FIGURE 5
20161012_Combined_R_a_b1_B2_paper.gph

FIGURE 6
20161021_Gap_Red.gph
20161021_Prop_Red.gph
20161021_R_Rank_Order.gph


APPENDIX D
20161021_Comparison_EH.gph








  